um... Mickey Mousecapade... came up with a romp through traditional Japanese mythology

called Momotarou Densetsu. Yes, it means "The Legend of Peachboy." Deal with it. This series

only ran for a few games between 1987 and 1993, because it was soon overshadowed by

this series, Momotarou Dentetsu. Yes, it means "The Electric Railroad of Peachboy." Deal

with it. And, since Japan apparently really loves roll-and-go board games, it's a roll-and-go

board game with some real-estate speculation, planes, trains, boats, and some fat kid chasing

you around looking for handouts.

Two to four players, human- or computer-controlled, each take charge of their own railway and

holdings consortium, taking turns throwing the dice and travelling throughout Japan and

to nearby locales up to and including Hawaii for crying out loud. (Yeah, that's a long

time in a plane.) Depending on where you land, you stand to gain or lose some tens of thousands

of yen, or perhaps pick up a card for use later like it's Mario 3 or something. At intervals,

you can hit the stations that stud the various railways of Japan, whereupon you can spend

your hard-earned cash to invest in restaurants, resort hotels, and other attractions designed

to fleece hard-earned yen from from the beleaguered businessmen who need a moment's respite from

their workaday lives. Through intelligent investing, and let's be reasonable, a hell

of a lot of luck as everything fixates upon dice rolls after all, you've gotta build up

your portfolio and make BANK, kinda like Monopoly with less linearity and not nearly as many

threats by your grandmother to cut you out of the will.

Awright, I'll admit, I was a bit lost as this copy didn't come with with instructions at

all and there isn't an in-game help function. Perhaps an understanding of the Momotarou

Dentetsu series is just a cultural thing in Japan, as there's been like a bajillion releases

in this series, stretching from the Famicom to the GameGear to the PS2 to the iPhone.

It's left that silly RPG-wannabe Momotarou Densetsu in the dust and replaced it with

demons and animals running transportation services. It's fairly ambitious, and it kinda

has to be, as it finds itself competing with any of a number of Game of Life clones, Itadaki

Street, and then the likes of Mario Party where it certainly loses out in the field

of N64 controller destruction. The game runs, at the rate of one turn every month, for one

to five years, with each "year" taking an average of a half an hour. And, since it's

a Japanese game that takes place over the course of several in-game years, it STARTS

IN APRIL. It always starts in April. Hamster games? Start in April. McDonalds Monogatari?

Starts in April.

Super Momotarou Dentetsu II isn't a must-import title unless you've got every inch of your

body tattooed with Hudson Bees and you're an absolute hardcore collector, but it is

cool to experience so you can get an idea of the lineage behind games like Mario Party

or Dokapon Kingdom or... well, we even got a flavor of Itadaki Street here in the states,

so we'll go with that too. Just... can you tell this fat kid to stop following me? He's

seriously creeping me out.